Empty Hands and Tired Eyes
by lachatas
Summary: In which Natalie is cold, tired, and maybe, just maybe, hopelessly in love with Dan. HS!AU, OOC warning


Fic title from the song Dinosaurs — The Maccabees. Written on a whim for a friend.

This is an HS!AU, so heavy OOC warning. **Warning: **This fic contains mentions of depression, underage sex and alcohol usage/abuse. T for language and implied sex, mostly.

* * *

America is so bloody depressing.

Natalie's fingers brush light circles against the smooth texture of her handbag, a steady rhythm to help calm her current nerves. There's a slight shake to her fingers; she wonders briefly if it's to do with it being her first day of high school — in the States, of all places. She then wonders if it's because she hasn't seen the Cahill boy in months, perhaps years (she wouldn't know — the lines of divide in her time away have blurred into a meaningless plane of grey), and the thought of being with him in a place where he'd be in his element, not her, slightly (just slightly) unnerves her.

Either way, she's anxious. And cold, and tired, so _tired_. There's a constant chill running through her bones, deep under her veins, and she grips the straps of her bag tighter. _It's going to be fine_, she whispers. She's holding onto Gucci, presenting the essence of Chanel, sporting the jewels of Dolce & Gabbana, and draped in the fabrics of Marc Jacobs. _It's going to be fine, _she repeats, over and over again, a mantra of pure reassurance.

She takes a deep breath, a gasp of cool Massachusetts air burning and churning in her lungs, and pushes the school's heavy-set, metal double doors open. _Hello_, _America_, she thinks, a greeting of despair etched in the back of her brain. _Here goes._

* * *

In all honesty, American high schools are a strange phenomenon. Her boarding school in London had been endlessly conservative, brief praying periods and girls in below-the-knee skirts and long study sessions in between sips of tea. Elegant versus eclectic. Routinely versus the disorder here, an arcane web of slews of different social cliques.

The classes are especially hectic, rows upon rows of unfamiliar faces and words. She's doing surprisingly all right, but it's lonely, so horrendously lonely. The girl on her right during maths once tries to make conversation, but she barely hears her — there's a soft fuzz in her ears, a buzz of _why am I still here _and _is there still a point to this _and eventually the contender for her attention fades back away into the meaningless blur between her eyes.

Natalie doesn't hate high school. She really doesn't.

But fact is, she doesn't really hate anything, or _feel_ much about anything these days.

Days fall into sunshine or no sunshine, rain or no rain, _do I have a test today?, _and _someone's-talking-to-me–what-face-should-I-put-on_.

Days fall into cold stretches of noise or no noise, cackles of static bursting her eardrums and deafening quakes of silence. She doesn't see the Cahill boy for three whole weeks, until one day a boy (_oh, _how she hates human interaction) approaches her and invites her to a party down the block.

She's prepared to say no. She's prepared to ignore him. But for once, she goes _ah, fuck it_, and accepts. It's at 6pm, tomorrow, on a Friday night. Natalie finds it kind of pathetic, to party when it's still daytime, but she supposes that freshmen have their limits. Either way, she ends up attending, a reluctant last-minute decision before the scrutinizing glare of her brother, who'd gone, _"Natalie, you never do anything these days," _who'd _noticed_, finally fucking saw, that something was wrong. It'd been alarming, to say the least, and she'd finally just gone up and left.

The sun is still up, to no one's surprise. It's a lonely sort of day, though, broken cloud lines swimming over said drowning sun, washing the sky into an ugly faded grey. Matt _something, _perhaps Boman or Boyd, answers the door, arm snug around the waist of a petite redhead. _Jessica Whitman_, her brain supplies helpfully, and she allows herself into the house. There are at least fifty people — of all grades — crowded in the place, grinding against each other shamelessly to the packed beat of some obscure electronic pop band.

Natalie grits her teeth. This is going to be a long night, she thinks.

Her hands itch to grip onto something, so she gently smoothes down the wrinkles of her black taffeta dress and gets up to pour herself some diet coke (into one of those obnoxiously stereotypical red American party cups, mind you). Her fingers find refuge in the lines of the crinkly stuff, squeezing the life out of it as she stands helplessly in the midst of horny teenage boys and girls.

Natalie is lost, confused — _whys _and _whats _and _whos _float around in her head, strings of _why am I here and what the fuck is going on_ and_ who's that? Who's she? What's the point of this all? _She's lost in a haze of cracked smiles and unsteady movements, a routine of isolating the noisy static outside her brain.

She's awoken by a loud whisper at the base of her ear, warm breath taunting the skin on the top of her neck. "Natalie!" The voice says, and _oh_, that voice. That wretched voice.

* * *

She'd recognize it anywhere.

Natalie turns around, slowed by the motion of dread, to the perfectly shocked face of Dan Cahill. _Dan fucking Cahill. _He's grown up a lot since she last saw him, face narrowed down to form gorgeous cheekbones and bright green eyes crinkled beneath the tips of long brown bangs. He looks beautiful, and _happy_, and just so full of life and light that Natalie doesn't know what to say or do.

Natalie feels a sudden rush of disorientation, that feeling of meeting an old, old stranger, an unfamiliar shadow in the backdrop of her past. "Hello, Dan," she says, a bit of ice in her voice. He grins, unknowing, and takes her free hand. "What are you doing here?"

Her jaw tightens, in an _Oh, you know. I've only been attending the same high school as you for almost a month _kind of way. She explains this, only worded more gracefully, and his eyes widen comically. "Seriously?" He says with a laugh. "Natalie and Ian Kabra in a _public high school _in Massachusetts?"

He finds it funny, she realizes. Only it isn't, really.

(She laughs along anyway.)

"Yes," she replies, stiff and awkward and uncomfortable. He seems to notice, because he offers her his cup, filled halfway with some murky orange-brown liquid.

"Want some booze?"

Natalie hesitates, then thinks, _why the fuck not_, and takes a long gulp, chugging the liquid down. The buzz is exciting and warm (a bit bitter, but she doesn't mind), and burns smoothly on the tip of her tongue. Her brain fuzzes a bit more. Her smile relaxes.

The hours pass. The sun's been out for hours now — it's past midnight now, and a few kids burdened with the unfortunate existence of curfews are making their way out. Eventually, Dan says, "See you around," and she nods in the haze of the moment. Sure, why not. She can't think straight. There's a bottle of Jack Daniel's in the palm of her right hand, clasped under perfectly manicured fingernails.

Sure. _Sure._

Great.

Natalie drinks the night away.

* * *

It turns out that Natalie _does _see Dan around. He pops up in the most unexpected of places, after school and in the hallways as she makes her way from Home Econ to Trig and when she finally ventures into that dark hole that Americans treasure so much named Target. Dan is everywhere, a pretty reassurance by her side and _eventually, _maybe, they become friends again. Almost best friends, because Natalie doesn't really have any others.

* * *

Natalie dates a boy named Jeffrey for a mere two months. He dumps her for a cheerleader, but by then she doesn't really care. He couldn't have broken her heart even if he'd tried.

Dan dates a girl named Sally. Sally has sweet blonde curls and wears sugary strawberry lip-gloss and smiles that speak _I love you I love you I love you _and_ I love the world I love sunshine and rainbows and unicorns _and Natalie always feels like suffocating when she's around. Dan brings her up sometimes, like, _Sally was wondering about this_, but after Natalie shows her obvious discomfort, he just laughs and returns to stabbing some innocent civilian in his game of Assassin's Creed III. Natalie grimaces from her place on his couch and skims her Biology textbook some more, but by then she's already been distracted by an image of a laughing and smiling Sally, that perfect ball of sunshine, hands gripping Dan tight as they perform some sort of lovely domestic task under the smile of the moon and the stars.

* * *

Things only get worse from there.

Junior year rolls around. Natalie comes to the heart crushing realization that she's hopelessly, madly in love with Daniel Cahill. That she's gotten herself stuck in a bottomless pit and that there's no getting out, no crawling herself out of the mess and tangle of her feelings.

_I'm tired, _her brain screams.

And she is.

She's been hanging onto a thin string for the past three years of her life, an empty void sucking the light out of her eyes. She doesn't feel anything. She doesn't hate or love anything.

She doesn't hate or love anyone. That is, other than Dan Cahill.

(The string snaps, and she falls, falls and falls and falls and she knows that there's no end to it all.)

* * *

April of junior year hits her like a storm. Natalie drinks harder than ever, sips and chugs and gulps down beer and spirits and all sorts of alcohol until she can barely breathe, until she sees stars and her vision blurs into sluggish movements of warm colors and neon flashes. Natalie drinks and drinks and drinks until she falls asleep with a deafening buzz running through her brain, until she wakes up and pushes herself to the toilet to empty everything she's consumed in the past ten hours.

She's absolutely inebriated, high off of this feeling, and it's _great_.

_It's so fucking intoxicating._

* * *

Natalie loses her virginity in the closet of senior jock Aaron Helders's room, to another senior she doesn't know whilst the usual weekend party is in full swing. It's somewhat uncomfortable and wet and he comes much too early, but at least it's _something, _and she likes the high that accompanies the end of it all, albeit it not being particularly monumental.

In that one month, she lets another guy fuck her in the back of his house's storage room. It's better than the first time, honestly, and she begins to enjoy herself — it all becomes a blur of drunkenness and dark touches under her shirt and quick thrusts hidden beneath the smell of sex. But then he tries to ask her out, on a real date, with dinners and pizza and hand holding, _the whole package_, and she runs out before she can give him an answer. (It's pretty clear, though: _no no no no_. _NO. _Never.)

* * *

Then, Dan breaks up with Sally.

Or maybe she breaks up with him. The details are blurry. Either way, he phones her at eleven one night, and exhales sharply, "_We broke up." _She stills, momentarily. _I'm sorry? _She tests the words in her head, but they sound too insincere. Too forced.

"Do you want to come over?" Natalie manages instead. Her nails taps at page 421 of her APUSH book nervously, over the printed image of Alexander Hamilton's stony face, a frantic rhythm that resonates through her entire arm.

_Yes. _

Okay.

_I'll be there in ten minutes._

Sure.

True to his word, Dan shows up at her door nine and a half minutes later. (She wasn't counting. Of course not.) "Hey, Dan," she says, and she's pretty certain he's been crying. His eyes are a bit red and puffier than usual, but she doesn't mention it. "Hey, Nat," he replies, and she _hates _the nickname (and he knows this), but she's a good best friend and doesn't mention it. Just this once, she'll let it slide.

She pulls out Ian's Xbox 360 and puts in Borderlands. She doesn't like the game, but that's all right, because she knows that Dan does, so she pulls out two controllers and tosses him the fully functioning one. He seems almost grateful when he slides onto the couch, eyes a bit more lightless than what she's accustomed to and mouth turned down in an almost-frown.

"Hey," he begins again, as he guns down some sort of alien running at him (Natalie never bothered to learn what they were called, and frankly she couldn't care less).

"Yeah?"

"Um, well. I have something kind of... kind of important to tell you."

_Okay. _"Sure."

"Well, you see, the thing with Sally. I mean, the break-up. It was kind of mutual, but like. It had to do with me. Mostly. Yeah."

_Okay? _"Okay."

"I mean, like. She brought it up, but then, like, it all came down to me." _Get to the fucking point, Cahill. _"Like, she was like, 'Dan, do you even like me?' And I was like, 'Yeah, sure I do.' And I mean, I do. I do like Sally. But _everyone _likes Sally. I guess I never really loved her, I guess — you know."

_Okay. Yeah, sure. Of course I do._

"But like, that's not all. After that, when I wouldn't answer, she was like, 'Yeah, but it's not just me, is it?' I didn't really get what she was trying to say, but then she continued, all like, 'Like, it's about her, isn't it? Natalie? That depressed girl in the back of Algebra 3 Honors?'"

_Oh. _Natalie grimaces a bit at the wording, but she doesn't interrupt. He continues. "Then, I was like, _what do you mean, _y'know? And she was like, 'What do you take me for, blind? It's so obvious that you love her. You always have,' and then I kinda got it. It kinda hit me."

Natalie's staring a bit too hard now, and the words won't come out. _What is this what's going on, _she thinks, and she's a bit too close to panicking so she just looks at her hands resting on either side of her knees, fingers scraping at the soft material of her sofa. Their controllers have both been set down.

"So, like," Dan says, a nervous note wavering in his voice, "What I'm trying to say is that, maybe, I'm completely, utterly in love with you? Like, maybe. A lot." The words won't come out, not at all, but then he tentatively puts his hand over hers and she relaxes, just a bit.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. _Yeah. _Okay." she whispers, light and quiet and unsure. "I- I'm in love with you, too," she forces out, quick and rushed and embarrassed. "Yeah."

His grin just about breaks her.

She's not supposed to feel, but there she is, a slew of emotions and warmth and _I-could-be-ok _rolling in the pit of stomach, butterflies fluttering at an uncomfortable pace.

"Okay," he says, and she cracks a smile back.


End file.
